Someone To Watch Over Me
by ophelia8
Summary: What could a traumatized orphan possibly hope to get from a deadly yokai who doesn't know the meaning of the word love? . . . unless of course, he does.
1. Chapter 1

_Dark__  
__Shouting__  
__Fire__  
__Screams!__  
__Running, dragged by the hand__  
__Heart-hammering__  
__Stumbling—falling hard__  
__Rolling__  
__A shriek—Mother! __  
__A rain of hot, dark droplets__  
__Crashing into brambles that scratch__  
__Tearing free_

_Running alone_

--------

_The old dream shatters with the appearance of the long shadow. There is a flash—moonlight on a perfect curve that seems to hang, like a second shining sickle in the sky. There is no war cry; the blade announces itself with the ring of steel clearing its saia. After a single, weightless moment, the sword's brightness blurs in the speed of its fall. _

_An instant later the hoarse screams of men replace the terrified cries of women and children. _

_When the blade rises again, its sheen is duller, black and wet-looking in the colorless light. _

-----------------------------

Rin jolted awake.

She sat up in the grassy hollow where she'd lain curled, sleeping. The old terror clung to her like the smell of blood, and her gaze darted around her as she searched for the blurred shadows of men and horses. Her kimono had gotten twisted during her fitful sleep, and she clutched the rumpled front folds with one small hand. The cloth was damp with her sweat, and she could feel her heart pounding through bone and flesh and fabric.

_Where was she? _

There were no blazing houses in sight--no leaping, hellish light giving ruined bodies a grotesque semblance of movement. Instead, she saw only a moonlit field dotted here and there with trees. Nothing human stirred out in the great silvered sea of grass.

At last, Rin allowed herself to exhale softly with relief. Settlements and people were far away. A soft summer wind whispered in the grasses, and gently lifted the ends of her sweat-dampened hair. Still seeking reassurance, she cast a quick glance to either side, to make sure her demons were still with her.

They were. Ah and Un lay coiled in the grass to one side, and their glittered-green eyes slid open to meet her wide, dark ones. They gave her a questioning look that turned more un-curious by the second, until one set of dragon lids drooped shut, and then the other followed. She didn't have to look for Jaken. A noise like a sick pig snorting through a flute announced that he was sleeping nearby, concealed by the tall grass.

She was safe.

But . . . she never really felt like she was "home" unless Sesshomaru-sama was with them. To Rin's silent disappointment, he left often, especially at night, on mysterious missions of his own. She never complained, and neither did the others, even though she sensed they felt his absence as keenly as she did. It simply wasn't their place to tell him when he could come and go. The great Inu Yokai was Lord of the Western Lands, and Rin, Jaken, and Ah-Un belonged to him—not the other way around.

Still, when he was in residence, it felt like they were a type of family. When he was gone, Rin felt a void inside. But as an orphan and former village pariah, she was used to loneliness, and she stoically endured the long, empty hours the way she endured the cold of winter and the bitter lash of rain. It was just a part of the world and the way things were.

So when she stood up to see if the Demon Lord was close by, she didn't really expect to find him in their rather sorry little camp. He had better places to be—such as tearing through the air like a shooting star or running among the clouds in his true form.

But to her surprise and immense joy, she actually found him present, sitting with his back up against the trunk of the spreading maple tree that was their current shelter. He was facing away from her, but she could make out the silver-white of his long hair and the spiked epaulette of his shoulder armor.

She resisted the urge to run to him as she was, since he preferred to see her clean and tidy. Actually, he tended to kick Jaken if the little green retainer allowed her to become unacceptably disheveled. Hoping to reflect well on her small, unwilling caretaker, she quickly straightened her kimono and retied the ribbon that held her hair out of her face.

Once she was presentable, she padded through the grass and stopped to one side of Sesshomaru, folding her hands in front of her and politely waiting to be acknowledged. He seemed preoccupied, but she was patient. Really, she was content just to stand near him in the nighttime quiet.

At first he didn't respond to her presence; instead, he stared off across the field as if his mind were far distant. Rin had no idea what he was thinking about, but she was sure it was important. In any case, he was sitting in his familiar watchful-defensive posture—a guard modified for the fact that he had only one arm. He'd pulled Tensaiga forward so that its saia lay horizontally across his stomach, and he'd rested his wrist on its handle. It looked like a careless gesture; in fact the languidness of his pale, long-fingered hand would almost have seemed effeminate, if it weren't for the claws. From experience, however, Rin knew that any apparent delicateness on his part was an illusion. He could be out of that comparatively-relaxed position and blasting an enemy into the next world faster than the eye could follow, if he had to. It was one of the things that Rin found the most comforting about him.

When Sesshomaru was deep in thought, he generally ignored people who tried to talk to him—or else gave them a look that strongly discouraged any further attempts to disturb him. He would, however, respond to potential threats, or if Rin needed him for something. Apparently, seeing her in an unacceptable state of want was serious enough to warrant a reaction.

This time, she waited less than a minute before he turned his head toward her, and a stray shaft of moonlight picked out a gleam of amber in his eyes.

"Rin," he said simply.


	2. Chapter 2

A stupid human would have heard no inflection in his voice, but Rin knew all about communicating without using words—and about how someone's body could convey hidden intentions. Despite Sesshomaru's apparent iciness, she read an open invitation to approach in the absolute stillness of his sword hand. Not even Jaken could get this close to him without those long fingers curling in at least slightly toward Tensaiga's handle.

Immensely honored by his attention, Rin made her statement short: "Sesshomaru-sama, I had a dream."

He sniffed the air slightly and said, "You smell as if you've been running."

Rin raised her hand instinctively to the still-dampened front of her kimono and said, "Yes." Too young to be embarrassed about smelling of sweat, she was simply impressed that he could sniff out the contents of her dreams.

He turned away toward the empty sea of grass, and his profile was in shadow once more. "Always the same one, isn't it?"

"No—this time it was different," she said. She'd been mute for so long after her family's murder that sometimes words pushed and shoved to get out of her, and they got all jumbled up. Her description of the dream came out in a confused rush: "It was like before, when the bandits came, only this time you were there, and you had Tensaiga, and you cut up all the bad people and brought the good ones back to life if they were killed, and you saved us all."

Silence. Other than a slight bending forward of his head that might have meant anything, he gave no indication that he had heard her barrage of words at all. As the quiet stretched on, she had ample time to hear her own words echo in her ears. Now they sounded babyish and silly, and she began to wish she'd never mentioned any of it. She could almost hear Jaken mocking her for even dreaming such a ridiculous thing about Lord Sesshomaru, who didn't like humans, and was not in the habit of rushing into battle to rescue them.

Except for her. He had come to rescue her.

She balled her little hands into fists as she fought to believe. He would have saved her family and neighbors, if only he'd been there. He _would_ have.

She heard him release a long breath, and when the light shifted with the windblown tree branches, she got a look at his face. He had that far-away expression again, only this time there was a glint of something hard and bitter in his eyes. It was, perhaps, the look of a man who knows the world, and knows himself, and finds neither as he would like them to be.

"It was just a dream, Rin." His voice was soft, but offered no sweet deceptions.

Rin's tears had dried up along with her voice on the morning she'd found her mother's corpse lying a short way from their village, the body only recognizable by the unstained patches of her overskirt and the fallen wrap that had been around her hair. Now, however, she felt unfamiliar burning prickles in her eyes. She blamed Jaken for cruelly inventing the idea that there could have ever been a time when Lord Sesshomaru would not have helped her. Sesshomaru-sama was just saying that her dreams were not the same as what was real. That was all. He had saved her so many times . . . it was stupid to believe that he wouldn't have intervened on that terrible night.

"Yes, but I _wish_ . . ." she began, but the imaginary, choking hand around her voicebox squeezed closed again, preventing her from speaking of what lay behind the steel screen that divided her life into "before" and "after." Blocked in that direction by her self-imposed vow of silence, she tried expressing her yearning in another way. "I just wish . . . that everybody hadn't had to die before I could be with you."

Sesshomaru's face was in shadow once more, but this time she thought she heard a definite softening in his voice. "Everybody dies, Rin. Even the greatest of the diayokai passes out of this life eventually."

Rin knew that his father was dead—killed in a terrible whirlwind of fire and the sword, like Rin's own parents—and that Sesshomaru missed him. The Demon Lord never openly expressed his feelings on the matter, of course, but then, Rin never said more than the bare minimum about her family either. Really, she and Sesshomaru-sama understood each other best when they didn't use words.

Even in silence, they didn't always agree on everything, however. He seemed truly unconcerned by the fact that everyone and everything died, while the thought of losing anyone else to the greedy pallbearers of the next world made Rin's stomach contract into a tight knot of fear.

"But you won't die," she told Sesshomaru. "Not for a long, long, long time—will you?"

He turned to look at her again, and she was relieved to see the hint of determined wickedness in his eyes. "I wasn't planning on it." As if to underscore that statement, his long fingers curled slightly around Tensaiga's handle.

By rights, that should not at all have been a comforting gesture at all, but some of the panicky tightness in Rin's insides relaxed at his implied eagerness to cut down anything that crossed him, including death itself. Lord Sesshomaru might be little loved in the Western Lands, but to Rin, he was the answer to uncounted desperate prayers. He was a guardian who was a hundred times a match for any bandit—even for any yokai wolf pack—and who, almost, could not die.

Overcome with adoration and gratitude, it was all she could do not to throw herself immediately into his embrace. Not even Rin was allowed to touch Lord Sesshomaru without his permission, however. Sudden moves in his direction inevitably made him go for his weapon. Instead of rushing him, she asked with polite wistfulness, "Sesshomaru-sama, may I come sit with you?"

He was extremely wary of having anything interfere with his lone sword arm—and grew even more hostile if someone crowded him to his left, next to Tensaiga's saia--but he did sometimes let Rin sit close when things were quiet. His only response to her question was to lift his elbow enough to allow her to duck under and through, which she quickly and happily did. This left her pressed up against his side, wrapped in the same circle of protection that ended at Tensaiga's handle.

The chestplate he wore made him hard to curl up against, but Rin was able rest her head in the hollow of his shoulder, where the furry pelt he wore slung over that arm acted as a makeshift pillow. The trailing fur lay on the grass beside him as well, and Rin burrowed beneath it so that it half-spilled over her drawn-up knees. Someone who spotted the Demon Lord sitting in the shadow of the tree might have entirely missed the dark head of the child leaning up against his chest. The rest of her was almost completely covered by fur and the long bell of his sleeve.

One did not hold onto Lord Sesshomaru under normal circumstances—it unnecessarily restricted his freedom of movement. He didn't seem to object if Rin lightly gripped the top of his chestplate, however. She did this, and allowed the backs of her fingers to press against his outer garments. The warmth of his skin was faintly detectable through the fabric, and it felt . . . normal. Nothing about him was especially soft or yielding, and the arm that was wrapped around her felt more like an encircling guard rail than a type of embrace, but up close Sesshomaru-sama felt like anybody else. He didn't seem at all like the terrifying yokai made out of snow or dust or ash that she'd heard stories about in her village.

She buried her face in the fur at his shoulder, and decided that demons were more like people than people were. If only her demon family could stay like this always, and nobody ever had to go away or die!

Perhaps noting how fiercely she was pressing herself against him—uninviting armor or no—Sesshomaru seemed to shift his attention from whatever lay beyond the fields to the girl at his side. Rin could feel his body turn slightly as he looked down at the top of her head, and she hoped he wasn't deciding that she was becoming a pest. There was a kind of deliberative stillness about him, as if he were a bit surprised by her behavior, and was trying to decide how to respond. Silently, she pleaded with him not to shoo her away.


	3. Chapter 3

Perhaps he decided that he didn't really want an answer to whatever question he'd been asking himself, because suddenly his watchful tension was gone. Instead, he returned to his usual attitude of apparent disgusted detachment. He made a disapproving noise and said, "You have sticks and leaves all through your hair. Does Jaken do nothing to keep you clean?"

Embarrassed at being found unsatisfactory, and worried for Jaken's sake—even if he _was_ nasty sometimes--Rin jerked her hand back and ran it over her sleep-tangled hair. There were indeed small, hard objects in it, and she tried to quickly finger-comb them out. "I'm sorry," she said, "It's not Jaken-sama's fault. I was asleep in the grass . . ."

Sesshomaru forestalled any further apologies by reaching up and beginning to lightly pick leaf and grass fragments out of her hair with his claws. "I can't imagine how incredibly tedious it would be to have to worry about such things," he said. It was true that he never seemed to have to do anything to his own hair, which was actually quite a bit longer on him than Rin's was on her. Jaken had explained to her that like all yokai, Sesshomaru-sama was only a semi-physical being, and he didn't have to worry about the endless round of bathing, scrubbing, wringing, and drying that humans did in order to appear presentable. Rin figured that was just as well, since otherwise he'd spend half his time trying to keep tangles out of his hair and bloodstains out of his clothes.

For some time, she remained absolutely still, which was the intelligent thing to do when a demon capable of flinging acid with his claws was raking said claws through one's hair. Every now and again he'd fling away some small object and make a noise of displeasure. Rin internally winced with unhappiness every time he found something that didn't meet with his approval, until it occurred to her that he'd actually taken his hand off Tensaiga to work knots out of her hair. The sight of the "unguarded" sword handle—while someone else was within touching distance of the weapon, no less—made her eyes go wide.

Rin folded her hands up against her chest, moving them as far from the magical blade's hilt as possible in an attempt to honor the unspoken gift of trust Sesshomaru-sama had just given her. Of course, perhaps he simply thought she was only a little human girl who could do no harm anyway--which was true. He could kill her much faster than she could insult him by interfering with his sword. In any case, she remained motionless and near-breathless until he could drag his claws down the length of her hair without hitting a snag.

The needle-sharp ends of those claws of his turned out to be better at picking tangles loose than the teeth of any comb. Sesshomaru-sama was much better at the job than Jaken was—but then, Jaken didn't even have any hair, and he didn't much like having to tend to her. Nobody had taken so much interest in keeping Rin well-groomed since her mother had died.

Once he'd satisfied himself with her hair, and returned his hand to Tensaiga's grip, Rin went back to holding onto the upper edge of Sesshomaru's chest-plate. Feeling stunned and out of words again, she just pressed herself close him and listened to the different rates of their breathing for a while.

Her child's mind was not quite good enough at imagining others' lives for her to realize that she was probably the only person to have survived such close proximity to Lord Sesshomaru's claws in centuries, but she did understand that she'd just been claimed in some way. Maybe he couldn't—or wouldn't—be the hero of her dream, but he'd been willing to show that he was _something_ to her . . . perhaps something even more startling than her wishful imagination had conjured up. Who would have expected a creature like Sesshomaru to care about a human child's hair?

The thought gave her joy, but there was danger in that kind of happiness.

A broken pane of her former life flashed through her mind, disorienting in its fragmented clarity: her mother's smiling face; the dull red glow of a hut lit by banked coals and rush lights; the sound of fire-heated water being poured into a basin for a bath; the gentle strength of her mother's hands.

The last time she'd seen those hands they were gray, streaked with rivulets of a dry, black-red stain. They'd already looked as if they'd always been withered claws, and never once rosy fingers holding out autumn-perfect slices of persimmon.

_No. It didn't happen that way. Death isn't like that. You can undo it and make it better. Sesshomaru-sama knows how to do it. _

Hardening herself against the onslaught of old images, Rin repeated the words in her head until they became true.

The unexpected window to her former life slid shut and grayed out as quickly as it had come, but it left her gripping Sesshomaru's chest armor more tightly than she was supposed to. If she clung to him, how could he stand up and immediately deal with enemies if they appeared?

She could already feel a tension in his body, as if something were wrong. Rin let go of his chest plate. The action-ready feel of his sword arm did not dissipate, however, and though she did not meet his gaze, she could feel him looking at her.

Still feeling oddly distant from herself, Rin heard herself asking shakily, "Sesshomaru-sama? Could we pretend something?"

"Could we pretend something?" he echoed. She didn't usually ask foolish things like that, and there was a hard edge in his voice, as if he thought her wits might have gotten scrambled.

"Could we pretend that I was your little girl, and not a human at all, and not going to die?" she asked. "That way I could stay with you always."

"Oh," he said, and returned to his position gazing off across the field, as if something that had alarmed him had turned out to be nothing. He shifted her slightly in his arm, dislodging her from her emergency-like clinging. He didn't push her away entirely, however, and allowed her to return her head to its former spot against his shoulder. At last, he gave a weary-sounding sigh.

"Rin, I don't play pretend."

END

_Note: If the ending seems too abrupt, read the last line again and look for a second meaning. Sesshomaru is the master of plausible deniability. ;)_

_Thank you for reading!_


End file.
